The timeline for The CW’s Arrowverse of shows might be a little hard to keep track of sometimes, but one fan’s observation may have just made things a bit more confusing.
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Reddit user Furore910 recently shared a screenshot from Arrow‘s first season, in which Patrick Sabongui can be seen playing a drug dealer who very quickly gets killed. There is, of course, a bit of an irony to this, as Sabongui has since gone on to play (the very much alive) Captain David Singh on Arrow‘s sister show, The Flash.
Of course, this certainly isn’t the first or last time that The CW has used the same actors across multiple shows, but the fact that both Arrow and The Flash are set in the same fictional universe theoretically makes things a bit more complicated. As it turns out, this isn’t even Sabongui’s only pre-Flash appearance on Arrow, with him also playing a soldier in the episode “The Huntress Returns”.
But hey, considering how many doppelgangers and alternate versions of characters exist within the Arrowverse (and how many times the timeline has changed), maybe there’s a way to explain Sabongui’s Arrow Season 1 appearance. After all, the Arrowverse already did poke fun at this to an extent, by having the Earth-2 version of Singh be a criminal who gets arrested by the CCPD.
Either way, it’s arguably for the best that Sabongui’s biggest Arrowverse role is as Singh, an openly gay police captain who is set to become governor in the future timeline.
“I always knew it was important.” Sabongui said in a recent interview with FanSided. “I always knew that just the existence of Captain Singh was making an impact. And then when the episodes started to air and people started to find me on social media, I would get every now and then these direct messages from kids, and I get moods when I think about this, but like kids in the Midwest or kids in the Deep South sharing with me their stories of discrimination and saying ‘I live in this really small town and I don’t feel the same as everyone else but I could never tell anybody. So seeing Captain Singh, you know the strong character in my favorite show, makes me feel that I’m normal. Makes me feel that I’m okay’ and I’m like, that is so real to me.”
“Some kid entrenched in this community that doesn’t accept him or her can see themselves represented in Captain Singh either because of being a visible minority or because of his sexual orientation and feeling like they identify. That could have untold effect in that child’s life.” Sabongui continued. “That is real, more real to me than any contract or any ratings or any other kind of success. That is affecting somebody’s life that may not have found that they feel okay in their identity until you know maybe I can contribute to it. So it’s one of the highlights of my career, honestly being able to be part of people’s experience that way.”
Arrow airs Mondays at 8/7c on The CW. The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
